Major League Baseball has made a lot of changes to the game – some of them fairly dramatic – in order to make the game a better watch for casual fans. Several of the moves – like banning the shift and limiting mid-inning pitching changes – have been specifically designed to help create offense during an era when pitchers/throwers are dominating like never before.
All you had to do was watch the recently completed snooze-fest of an MLB All-Star game to see that the game’s best hitters are no match for the game’s best pitchers/throwers these days. With fewer than a dozen players in MLB currently hitting .300 or above, it’s hard to argue that offense doesn’t need more of a boost. Contests like that ASG didn’t bring in any new casual fans. It just put a lot of folks to sleep.
Today, with bullpens made up of at least eight guys, hitters have no chance to get familiar with an opposing pitcher, because they only face any one of them once on a given night. Top-flight starting pitchers might face the same hitter twice in a single game during their five or six innings of work, but that’s it, unless that starter is elite. Then comes a steady stream of flamethrowers who will come into the game, throw as hard as they can for a single inning, then pass the baton – just like in the All-Star game.
That’s why strikeouts are way, way up, and batting averages are way, way down. They’ve had to invent new statistical measurements to see if MLB hitters are productive or not.
Time was, MLB teams had pitching staffs of 10 or perhaps 11, which allowed them to also keep 15 or so position players on the roster at one time. (This is when starting pitchers really knew how to pitch and how to navigate seven innings on most nights, but that’s for another column.) This meant you had your starting eight players plus a designated hitter, and you still had six hitters on your bench, available to pinch-hit and sub in.
That benefited the offense.
Today’s eight-man bullpens only leave room for four bench guys on a given night, which limits a manager’s options and makes creating offense more difficult.
So how’s this for another semi-dramatic rule change? Make it so teams can have no more than 10 pitchers on the active roster at any one time.
What would this do? For one, it would bring back the value of a starting pitcher who could pitch into the seventh inning on a regular basis. Guys like Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander and Clayton Kershaw, who only needed one or maybe two relief arms to finish off victories. Those guys are fun to watch.
But more importantly, most teams don’t have a future Hall-of-Famer at the top of their rotation, and most clubs’ third, fourth and fifth starters are more “pedestrian” by MLB standards. Those guys will have to pitch more innings because teams will have fewer reliever options.
That would dramatically help offenses.
This kind of roster change would place a premium on starting pitching again, which would make the game better as a whole, and it would result in a lot more .300 hitters.
There might be pushback from the players’ union, but then again, this would not mean a loss of jobs. Roster sizes wouldn’t change, they’d just balance out – and being able to balance offense and defense would make the game much more watchable.
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